GRDT: Group-based Reliable Data Transport in wireless body area sensor networks

Recent technological advances in sensors, low-power microelectronics and miniaturization, and wireless communications have promoted the research and development of wireless body area sensor networks (WBASN), which has gained a lot of attention from researchers for its promising application in medical care and health care field. Reliable data transmission, which means that data is timely transmitted to the sink node without loss, is one of the key points to a successful application of WBASN. In this paper, we proposed a Group-based Reliable Data Transport (GRDT) protocol, which can be used in WBASN for periodical data acquisition. GRDT protocol adopts TDMA (Time Division Multiple Access) and FDMA (Frequency Division Multiple Access) schemes to control channel access, which can avoid the emergence of congestion and tremendously improve the network throughput. Moreover, GRDT protocol provides block feedback message scheme instead of synchronous ACK for hop-by-hop loss recovery mechanism, which will significantly reduce transmission delay and improve the packets reception rate. In addition, GRDT provides mobility and scalability support. Experimental and simulation results show that GRDT protocol can provide more than 99% reliability and the network throughput is up to 111 kbps (with 100 sensor nodes and 5 router nodes).